


Step Inside

by holyfant



Category: Black Sails
Genre: F/M, Multi, Polyamory, Tumblr Prompt, short fic meme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-11
Updated: 2016-12-11
Packaged: 2018-09-07 20:32:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8815351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/holyfant/pseuds/holyfant
Summary: This is not the right door. This is not the right time.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for sapphicsummerchild on tumblr, who requested a short fic with the prompt "knocking on the wrong door".

The body has a memory too: a thoughtless one, one of sleep and breathing and muscle. It’s like when Flint reads the sails and feels their movements in his breast. He knows how to correct them: his body tenses as if it’s already in the act, and it’s not lost on him that in many of his dreams, in tendrils of sleep snatched between rounds, he has become the ship, swaying and creaking.

 

Going on land is the sensation of stone, of the waves crashing on the sand. He doesn’t like it, its stillness. In the back of his mind, in the core of his body, there is that niggling memory: of what it means to move, to have the roiling of the world in your feet, the warm slide of another body against yours in the sea of your bed.

 

The Walrus is being repaired on the beach, stranded powerlessly on her side. Her hull, when he looked at it earlier, was monumental but vulnerable, her household of marine crustaceans already dying off in the merciless sun. He knows it’s a fluke of sentiment – that she’s dead wood, nothing more than a vessel – but it unsettled him to see her like that, splayed like a gutted fish.

 

So he left the men to it and went away. It’s a good reason to have in his head: _I went away because the stillness of the earth bothers me. I can’t be around the men when they work on the ship; they annoy me deeply._ He knows it’s not the only reason, not the _real_ reason, but Miranda will know too, and he won’t have to tell her.

 

Before knocking on her door he closes his eyes. She’s inside this house, doing something in her calm and confident way; he can almost feel her already. The air on his skin is humid and heavy, different from the sea – different from London. How often has he stood on a doorstep with his hand half raised towards the knocker, suddenly caught out by his heart quickening? It was a very different doorstep: cool stone, not warm wood, with an intricately carved knocker shaped like a lion’s head. The lion’s den… Thomas was inside that house, doing something in his calm and confident way; he could almost feel him already. The body has a memory: a thoughtless one, one of pumping blood and a tremor of love in the late hours.

 

He knocks: he knocked. Is it possible to be in two places at once? Perhaps he has been on the Walrus for too long, perhaps his bones are jostled by the unmoving ground underneath the soles of his feet. He feels faint, split in half like the keel of his ship. How to carry his love across the divide that he feels? This is not the right door. This is not the right time.

 

Miranda opens the door; she seems unsurprised to see him. Perhaps she too could almost feel him already, standing on the threshold of what remains of their life, hand raised to knock. He’s familiar with the way her happiness grows across her face: her eyes are still the same, even after everything they’ve seen. She doesn’t kiss him until he’s inside, and he can barely hold himself upright. She’s strong, Miranda: she lets him sink against her, catches his torso. He clasps his arms around her, desperate and hungry as if it’s the first time she’s letting him do it.

 

“James,” she says, and he knows it for what it is: a summoning, and a banishing of the demon that lives in his skin and that is named Flint.

 

He closes his eyes and breathes in her hair: Caribbean dust and sunshine, and also a hint of coconut hair oil from the Indies, which she keeps in a small bottle on her nightstand. A treasure from Thomas that she carried across worlds.

 

“I thought,” he murmurs, “Miranda, I thought that that he would be here too.”

 

If she’s hurt, she doesn’t show it. She embraces him tighter. “I know,” she says. “So did I.”


End file.
